Dr. Lipski will present research based on his extensive field work on language mixing between Spanish and Portuguese in communities along the Brazilian border in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. In so doing, he will address the longstanding and complex question of where dialects end and separate languages begin, with special attention to using a typology of language mixing as a tool for refining the often crude and problematic distinctions drawn between the concepts of dialect versus language.

John M. Lipski is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Penn State University.

The Jack Child Memorial Lecture Series was conceived by Dr. Usasi Chatterjee and has included colleagues and invited speakers to honor the memory of the late professor of Spanish and University Professor Jack Child. The lecture honors his commitment to teaching with technology and how it informs foreign language acquisition. The selected speaker will share their work and further research in the innovations of world language teaching and learning technologies and methods.